I Married A Car Guy: My Journey Toward Car Literacy

Hi, I'm Debbie Nol, and I married a car guy. My 14 years of working at Arie Nol Auto Center has been an incredible journey, building amazing relationships with customers and learning so much from our experienced technicians.

Now I'm launching a blog to share what I've learned about cars and some of my most memorable customer stories. Hopefully you will find my blog both helpful and entertaining!

Monthly Archives: February 2017

There has been a lot of talk about the automotive technician shortage. If you don’t work in a trade, you may not be aware of how few students currently enter a trade field. The push for a college degree is important but not all high school students need to pursue a degree to achieve their goals. If your son or daughter likes to disassemble items to see how they work, hopefully they'll have the opportunity to use that skill in their job if that's what they enjoy. Being a naturally technical person is a gift. One I don't have but I watch it in action day-after- day. Most of the trades require post high school education. There are very few jobs you can walk into without some type of training in this day and age. We were fortunate to be asked to have a student from a local high school job shadow with us for part of a day. It's a great opportunity for all of us to share what we love about this business as well as give someone the opportunity to see what ‘a day in the life of ... read more

I have a Fitbit that I may be mildly obsessed with. It was charging one day and I left the house and arrived at work without it. Walking anywhere seemed so pointless. No steps counted. No way to tell if I was going to make my 250 steps every hour that day. Did I even sleep well the night before? My Fitbit wasn’t there to tell me. I’d like to admit I’m exaggerating but I’m not. We have several scanners that have the capability to let us know the health of certain parts of your vehicle. One of these that’s very important is your car battery health. I like seeing the printout from a battery test, especially when it’s bad. It shows the voltage and rates the battery’s health. Here’s my reasoning. It’s cold out. Having your battery fail in Michigan in February will probably be miserable. You could have avoided this by having your battery tested periodically. It doesn’t take long and it’s painless. Finding out that your battery is weak is an opportunity to say, “Hey, I ... read more

There was a time when car owners brought their vehicle in for a grease job and an oil change. You also made sure that your car was ‘tuned up’. You might also have needed your carburetor adjusted. Those services are no longer needed on the newer vehicles. Why? There are several reasons. A tune-up consisted of replacing spark plugs, wires and checking the distributor. Today's vehicles no longer have wires or a distributor, thanks to a direct ignition system. The spark plugs that previously had copper tips now have iridium tips, which last thousands more miles than their predecessors. We also have fuel injection which makes the carburetor obsolete. You needed a grease job because some of your suspension parts needed to be greased on a regular basis. That's not true of most anymore. They essentially don't have to be greased because they have more of a closed system that doesn't allow you to insert grease. They're ‘pregreased’. Pre-greased is not an actual ‘automotiv ... read more